Sunday, 30 January 2011

Major Project, Major Job, Major busy January

Last time I posted the project was starting to progress into the actual production phase of the animation and I was presenting some of latest of the pre production work.

I would now like to bring everyone up to speed at the present state of the project as allot has happened since then and my roles in this project have shifted a considerable amount from doing design work to actually getting to grips with being the director of the project. It might be worth mentioning that in my previous post I haven't really mentioned that I am the director and I suppose this is down to the fact that originally as we started this project we as the team didn't have one, and thought we could make the decisions amongst ourselves. we soon realised that this wasn't going to work as decisions amongst us began to clash and we weren't moving forward. It was therefor decided by the team that I take up the role as director as I was responsible for not only the storyboard but the visual development of the world and its characters. As far as me not mentioning my status as director however, this was due to the fact that it was never considered by either myself or the team as being my official status until only recently as all of our roles seem to still merge with others due to the nature of this being our first major project and a student project at that.

So as of this point I shall be trying my utmost to present news to you of not only the work I have personally doing for the project but also the directorial decisions I have and will be making during the production of this animation short.

Going back to what has happened since December however, over the Christmas break It was universally understood by all the team members that the holiday be used to get the course's dissertation out of the way, so not to eat up time into the winter term. Even so, most of the team members were able to achieve some project work, based on a personal decision to keep the project on schedule. Credit must be given to Matt B and Scott for spending time over the holiday to work on rigging for the characters. Further credit should also be given to the remaining team members who stayed on and worked at uni during the week before Christmas, as again a means to allow us to stay on schedule.

By the time everyone got back in early January, everyone found it hard to get back into the swing of the project, especially considering when people had to change from focusing on the dissertation for so long. The first major issue we faced was more a technical oversight more then anything else. We had naively forgotten or put off agreeing on a method for sharing files and using universal file naming conventions. Thankfully after the first week, we were back on track and after I had a talk with Tom we had an updated schedule of what had to be done and by when.

By mid January, things were getting underway again and major ground was made on the rigs for the characters. Further more we accumulated more people to the team, all which have filled the much needed gaps in our skills area. Firstly, we have a music composer, Rich, from Dartington college of arts, who Tom was able to convince to join our project and generously compose a score for us. Secondly we have Sophie, from film, who has also agreed to help us and use her skills to record the Foley work for us. And Thirdly, Tom was able to get the support from our 3 second year animation students, Olly, Scott and Brian, who in order of name will be doing lighting, rigging and modeling/texturing/post.

At present, we have finished rigging for 2 of our characters and skinning is underway. Environments, have been slow to create, but on a positive note, texturing is occurring along side the asset creation, so environments should reach a finalised stage at the same time originally estimated. As for me, I have been talking to Tutor/Lecturer Derrik and have many more changes to do to the storyboard/animation. Finally animation, has started, but is still limited due to the characters level of development, but Roy has began animation with the Blimp flyby and I'm optimistic that character animation can start next week.

This post was more a less a catch up post. I will present a more in depth post as soon as possible, to give you a better grasp into the current developments being made.

For now, for more details on the specfic progress of some of the team please take a look at: